Derelictive

I gotta say MS is almost as annoying as Sony was back then. MS did not actually come and say "The next generation begins when we say it does" like Sony but they are not the scrappy upstart they were back then either.

One thing that Sony can do at E3 is have some gameplay that shows off as much of it's abilities game-wise as possible. I am sure there will be interesting stuff that will be honestly great coming from MS but if Sony has a few insanely cool looking gameplay footage and say a few reasonable things about DRM and used games they could get some momentum going.

To bad we will probably have to wait until the demos come out for any cross platform gameplay from each system to be seen as opposed to cutscenes. I am sure at first there should be little difference but maybe there will be some differences that may emerge especially especially if a game engine creator really wants to show off a bit.

Both :-) It had embedded ram AND it was kind of like a big PC graphics card ( i.e. GDDR that was just one chunk of memory used by both the GPU and the CPU, the PS3 of course had 2 different types of memory, one 256MB chunk for the cell and one 256MB chunk for the GPU). I am sure some titles will use the eSRAM the same way as the 360 but some will use it like a data cache and some will use it in some other way.

If I remember correctly there was another big thing that the PS3 and 360 had it common. Both used the same 3.2 Ghz PowerPC chip, the PS3 used it to host and dole out instructions to the 7 superduper DSPs that were the heart of the Cell and the 360 used 3 of those chips with a shared data cache. Some of the earliest ports for the PS3 just used that PowerPC chip and the Nvidia GPU which made them look crappy in comparison. That won't happen this time however.

As for exclusives we might be seeing that Microsoft's choice to force installs onto the hard disk and always be online may have been needed to secure a few exclusives so they may have an advantage that they might not otherwise have had assuming Sony doesn't do the same thing.

Hopefully for Sony developers will want to show off what they can do with a system that they essentially asked for. The power differential could be significant only if developers will gain benefits from using added hardware and programmable flexibility or they just want to show off :-) The PS4 will have a longer life as developers will find more ways to exploit the hardware but who wins is up in the air. Sony needs the win MS doesn't.

It's funny but the 360 was laid out more like the ps4 is. A "large" chunk of unified gddr memory ( gddr3 for the 360).

Well I guess it depends on how the eSRAM memory is used to know if it and the move engines can offset the bandwidth advantage. As for the lack of gpu hardware and it's affect we just won't know until the games are out but MS had no choice, either use fast but high latency memory or slower memory with a big cache and some burly DMA chips to help keep things moving. Still the xbone is more of a general purpose entertainment system than a gaming system so their choice for a system that mirrors a generalized PC seems reasonable for it's purpose.

The most that the ps4 will give up in RAM would likely be 2 but less could also be expected. The original specs was for 4 gb of GDDR5 RAM and it reserved 1/2 a gig for the OS.

As to the "better performance" being a hindrance rather than a helpful I don't think past experience is going to be that helpful. The PS3 was created at the height of Sony arrogance and so they expected slavish devotion from devs and created a system that was flexible and powerful but not easy to write code for ( the PS2 wasn't all that easy either but man they pushed the hardware ). 3rd party cross platform developers surely flocked to the already launched 360 and used it's easier development tools as a target and later ported to PS3 as time and budgets permitted.

Now we are looking at a situation where the PS4 is arguably the more "mainstream" design since it is basically laid out like a PC graphics card with a multicore cpu attached to it and it has quite good development tools. It wouldn't shock me if the PC/PS4 was the target and then ported to the Xbone, assuming the XBone isn't flying off the shelves at the expense of the PS4.

So I get that XBone is an entertainment system that can play games when it is called upon to do so but the "ONE thing you need" actually needs other external "things" to get the experience you are supposed to get.

You get the TV experience you want but only if you are in the US and have the proper cable box. You have to have a fairly substantial and reliable internet connection at all time. The Kinect has to be connected to work so you need to set things up to make sure it can fit and the xbone itself will still have a power brick and most likely can only be laid out horizontally (another shuffle to make room ... maybe ). Since all games will be installed on the machine along with any other movies/music/apps/whatever you will probably need to attach an external hard drive after a while needing a bit more space of course a long usb cable will help there.

So even though it is made for a mainstream audience and not gamers there are some limitations placed upon it by relying on some things that aren't mainstream just yet.